Follow PR Daily on:

5 top-rated cooking apps for Thanksgiving (and beyond)

Need a hand with the holiday cooking and baking this year? There’s an app for that.

Although finding new recipe ideas and inspiration online is nothing new, there are many excellent cooking apps to make preparing one of the most important dinners of the year a little less intimidating. Here are some of the top-rated apps by foodies:

Chow Thanksgiving Dinner Coach: For first-time holiday hosts, this app is a must. The free app walks cooks through the preparation of each step of all holiday staples—from the stuffing to the mashed potatoes, turkey to the pumpkin pie.

AllRecipes Dinner Spinner: Looking for new holiday recipe ideas? The Dinner Spinner has your back. The app enables chefs to not only search for recipes by keyword, but also to select the type of dish you want to make (breakfast, appetizer, cookies, etc.), a main ingredient (turkey, ham, pasta, etc.), and how much time you have to prepare it. The spinner then shows you all of the recipes in its database that matches your criteria.

Epicurious Recipes: For foodies, this is an excellent app that even offers a dedicated section for the holidays, including sections for turkey and gravy, Thanksgiving side dishes, fall desserts, and more. It’s a fairly no-frills app offering more than 200 recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines.

How to Cook Everything: Mark Bittman’s popular “How to Cook Everything” app compiles a “soup to nuts” tool providing tips to help consumers get through the holidays with ease. The app includes thousands of recipes, menu suggestions, how-to illustrations, straightforward cooking advice, recipe timers, and easy-to-use shopping guides.

Country Living Holiday Cookies: What would the holidays be without delicious baked goodies? This app includes 50 of Country Living’s best cookie recipes, including gingerbread, chocolate biscotti, snickerdoodles, and more. The app also features helpful baking tips and cookie-decorating tricks.

Even with the help of amazing cooking apps, executing the perfect holiday dinner requires chefs’ undivided attention, which can be nearly impossible with little ones running around. Keep the kids distracted and out of the kitchen with apps, such as the Thanksgiving Coloring Book or Whack a Turkey.

And, if you still manage to somehow mess up the holiday dinner, there’s an app for that too. Yelp’s app can steer you in the right direction for an open restaurant nearest you.

Diane Hurd is an account manager in the Columbus, Ohio, office of CMA (@CMABuildsTrust), a national public relations agency based in Kansas City, Mo. A version of this story first appeared on the CMA blog.